A surprisingly complicated question
The Steam Deck has sold millions of copies and doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. Valve released the handheld computer gaming device back in February 2022, and I got one not long after that.
Steam games
Steam isn’t exactly overflowing with baseball games. The platform still has yet to get a big AAA-quality baseball game like MLB The Show or one of its old competitors before they all died off. That will change soon with Japan-only Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2024-2025 coming to Steam this year but, whoops, it’s region-locked. And getting around a Steam region lock is difficult and risky.
So what is there? The Super Mega Baseball series is the closest thing available to something like The Show. It’s cartoon-y looking, which might turn you off at first, but it’s the best gameplay out there. All three games on Steam (2 is no longer for sale for some reason) are verified for Steam Deck and I can confirm they work well. Super Mega Baseball 4 has real-life legend players, but no roster import feature. Super Mega Baseball 3 is the one to get if you want to use a user-created roster for real MLB players. Super Mega Baseball: Extra Innings looks fairly old nowadays but is basically the same gameplay for $13 instead of $45, so it’s a reasonable option.
Out of the Park Baseball is the premier option for management/simulation games on Steam. After a brief blip at release, 25 has worked well on Steam Deck, and I think it’s a great way to play the game. There has been a persistent issue with stuttering animations after a sleep/wake cycle with the game running, but it’s not a major issue. You do have to get used to using the Steam Deck’s touchpad (or analog stick if you prefer) as a mouse, but that wasn’t an issue for me. The haptics on the touchpad when it’s used as a mouse are really well done.
Baseball Mogul is close to my heart, but is definitely in second place among baseball management games, and is regularly cheaper to get from codes in the Sports Mogul newsletter than on Steam. For that reason, I have no experience playing Mogul on Steam Deck to offer here.
The remaining baseball games on Steam are either VR (maybe possible with Steam Deck, but please don’t) or obscurities. Quick run-down on the obscure ones:
- World League Baseball – Pretty full-featured cartoon art style game. A little simpler than Super Mega Baseball but with better progression mechanics.
- Bad Hop Baseball – A Peggle-like with a baseball theme that fits Steam Deck well. The controls aren’t explained anywhere, but they don’t take long to figure out.
- Bottom of the 9th – A board game conversion. The resolution isn’t well-suited for Steam Deck, and so part of the UI are a little fuzzy.
- R.B.I. Baseball – A much-maligned reboot of the old Namco/Atari series, published by MLB itself. No longer sold but still offered at some key resellers, and it works fine.
- Astonishing Baseball Manager – A very simple GM game. Text is a little small.
- Desktop Baseball 2 – Cutesy simple baseball game set on a school desk. Works fine, though the resolution is a bit wrong so some UI elements are cut off.
- Super Psycho Baseball – A simple home run derby game. Mouse-driven and reflex-intensive, so not a good fit for Steam Deck.
- 2D Baseball Duel – A simple side-on baseball game like you might have seen in Flash games back in the day. Works well.
But thankfully, the Steam Deck is no walled garden. Almost any game that runs on computers can run on the Steam Deck, with varying degrees of effort.
Emulation
The Steam Deck is fantastic for emulation. Now, as easy as EmuDeck sounds, you will have to do at least a little tinkering if you go down this route. Nothing with hardware thankfully, but you’ll have to get used to moving around on the Steam Deck’s desktop interface. The era of the Linux desktop is finally here, in the form of a handheld gaming device.
Anything in the 8- or 16-bit era is simple and will work flawlessly. If you want to play something like R.B.I. Baseball (even with a roster mod!) or the SNES Ken Griffey Jr. games, you’ll have no trouble.
The next generation afterwards works perfectly in my experience as well. I don’t know who’s really going back to play the 989 Sports MLB games these days, but if you’d like, they run great.
PlayStation 2 games all run on the Deck with PCSX2. This might be a nitpick, but I am not a fan of PCSX2’s input lag, which I’ve spent some time trying to reconfigure and fight both on Deck and desktop without much success. Pitching meters especially can feel a little frustrating. I am often hopping between Deck and real hardware though, so it may be something I’d never think about if I weren’t comparing against the real thing.
Dolphin is a fantastic piece of emulation software, so GameCube and Wii games are almost always perfect on Steam Deck. When I’m playing MVP Baseball 2005 on Deck, I play the GameCube version. Wii games can sometimes be awkward if they rely on motion controls.
The next generation is where you start to see varying results. PS3 games will certainly run on the Steam Deck, but some perform acceptably and others are more trouble than they’re worth. RPCS3 is the emulator for these titles.
After that, Nintendo Switch is the only console that’s acceptably emulated. Some Switch games work decently on Deck, from what I hear. I have no experience with it, since I have a Switch and buy all the baseball games for it anyway. If you’re looking to play the latest The Show, there is a better legal option if you’ve got decent internet: Cloud streaming.
Cloud streaming
Xbox Cloud Streaming works well on Steam Deck and is even officially supported, kind of. It requires subscribing to Game Pass Ultimate. Subscribing to Game Pass will entitle you to play The Show 24, the sole remaining English-language AAA baseball game. The subscription also includes Super Mega Baseball 4, which we’ve talked about above.
It will definitely depend on the network you’re using, but Xbox Cloud Streaming worked great for me. There is a noticeable input lag difference if you switch from streaming to playing locally, but it’s surprisingly small. I did get video quality drops semi-frequently, but outside of those it’s pretty easy to forget you’re playing a streamed game.
Xbox Remote Play is also an option if you own either the current or last generation of Xbox (with their very clear names, the Xbox Series X|S or Xbox One X|S). This streams gameplay from your console rather than from their cloud. This resulted in fewer video quality drops for me, with a similar input lag.
If you own a PS4 or PS5, Sony has their own Remote Play equivalent. Using this on Steam Deck requires Chiaki, which takes a little effort to setup but works well. Again, your results may vary, but in my case, there are small audio glitches about once a minute, and video quality drops about once every ten minutes (less frequent than on Xbox). The input lag felt like more than Xbox streaming, but I was still able to happily play action-y baseball games off of my PS5 like Powerful Pro Yakyuu 2024-2025 and MLB The Show 24.
Steam also supports streaming a game from your library as it plays on another computer you own. Because there aren’t currently any baseball games available on Steam that are above the Steam Deck’s capabilities, that’s not currently relevant.
The Steam Deck is a great platform, though again I’ll warn you need some patience for tinkering with menus and settings unless you only want to play games on Steam.
YouTube Viewing Guide
- Usually I try to vary up the kind of game on the channel, but this week it was all pretty obscure Japanese stuff. Please accept my apologies. Here’s Dokaben by Capcom, based on the Mizushima Shinji manga. It’s a high school baseball card battler!
- Jitsuryoku!! Pro Yakyuu is an arcade version of Moero!! Pro Yakyuu AKA Bases Loaded. Stick around for the second game in the video to see the pitcher sprite from Bases Loaded make an appearance.
- Simulation Pro Yakyuu is a management game for Super Famicom. Bespectacled Yakult Swallows catcher Atsuya Furuta is on the cover and even gets his name in the title for this game’s sequel, which I’ll get around to eventually.